New Books Network

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Colleen Dunlavy, Emeritus Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, about her recent book, Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S. Into a Manufacturing Powerhouse. Small, Medium, Large examines the crucial role that the U.S. federal government played in rationalizing and diffusing industrial production standards, which over time greatly increased economies of scale and reduced the cost of both industrial and consumer goods.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Concetta Principe about her poetry collection, DIsorder (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). 

Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence ? a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home.

About Concetta Principe:

Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on the impact of the secular unconscious on culture and political thought. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet's Raymond Souster Award. Her essays, ?Who Shot Meriwether Lewis was long-listed for the 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award at The New Quarterly, and ?I Title it ?Suicide Letter was short-listed for The Malahat Review 2019 Constance Rooke award. Her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. Her academic monograph exploring trauma in contemporary secular thought, Secular Messiahs and the Return to Paul's Real: A Lacanian Approach, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham.

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How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of? In four exploratory essays, a seasoned historian examines the mechanisms by which ancient people came to have knowledge—not of the world and its myriad processes but about something more intimate, namely the individuals they encountered in close quarters, those they knew in everyday life. Tracing previously unfathomed structures beneath the surface of late ancient Christianity, Ellen Muehlberger reveals surprising insights about the ancient world and, by extension, the modern. Things Unseen holds treasures for scholars of early Christian studies, for historians in general, and for all those who wonder about how we know what we seem to know.

The book is open access.

Ellen Muehlberger is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. You can find many of the other essays mentioned in the show here. She is also the editor of The Journal of Early Christian Studies.

Michael Motia teaches in the department of Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the first two episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. The show posits an extraordinary intervention in worldwide politics and culture producing a utopia (that is of course simultaneously a dystopia) of quiescent bliss. Is the show shaping up to be another hit for the showrunner, previously responsible for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul?

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In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the stories of those most knowledgeable about it: veterans who were incarcerated after their military service. Combining a thorough historical narrative with the oral histories of veterans who had been imprisoned after their return to civilian society, Dr. Higgins shows how the so-called war on drugs and war on crime intersect with the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Through this history he shows how government policies built on racism, ableism, and patriarchy contributed to many young Americans being pushed into the military, punished during their service, and then being kicked out with no access to any type of support which then leads them into the carceral system. Dr. Higgins also tells the story of how incarcerated veterans helped organize amongst themselves leading to Veterans Treatment Courts which have helped reduce the number of veterans going into prison and also show a model for non-punitive responses to crime.

Prisoners after War has been awarded the Oral History Association's book award for 2025. It is available open access: https://uplopen.com/books/m/35...

Jason Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and Press and an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Virginia Tech University Library and the Department of History.

You can find a transcript of this interview here.

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According to a widely shared notion, foreign affairs are exempted from democratic politics, i.e. party-political divisions are overcome-and should be overcome-for the sake of a common national interest. This book shows that this is not the case. Examining votes in the US Congress and several European parliaments, the book demonstrates that contestation over foreign affairs is barely different from contestation over domestic politics. Analyses of a new collection of deployment votes, of party manifestos, and of expert survey data show that political parties differ systematically over foreign policy and military interventions in particular. The left/right divide is the best guide to the pattern of party-political contestation: support is weakest at the far left of the spectrum and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to green, social democratic, liberal and conservative parties; amongst parties of the far right, support is again weaker than amongst parties of the centre. An analysis of parliamentary debates in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom about the interventions in Afghanistan and against Daesh in Iraq and Syria shows that political parties also differ systematically in how they frame the use of force abroad. For example, parties on the right tend to frame their country's participation in the US-led missions in terms of national security and national interests whereas parties on the left tend to engage in 'spiral model thinking', i.e. they critically reflect on the unintended consequences of the use of force in fuelling the conflicts with the Taliban and Daesh.

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The word “metaphysics” conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable, metaphysical mysteries. But is that the right way to think about the subject matter of metaphysics? According to Amie Thomasson, very clearly no. In her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Thomasson argues that traditional views of metaphysics make the mistake of assuming that our concepts all function the same way – for example, that the job of metaphysics is to provide truthmakers for statements about necessity and possibility, about morality, about numbers, when each of these discourses have different aims. Thomasson, who is Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College, instead offers a deflationary view of metaphysics in which the job of metaphysicians is conceptual engineering – of figuring out how our concepts and terms work in a discourse, what their various functions are, and what conceptual schemes we should adopt, particularly if our current ones are leading us into metaphysical pseudo-problems.

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When the African Union was founded in 2002, it promised to deliver a more united, prosperous, and people-centred continent. Two decades later, Africa’s political landscape tells a more complex story: one of ambition and frustration, democratic progress and reversal, renewed activism, and enduring inequality. How far has the AU come in shaping “The Africa We Want”, and what does its evolving role reveal about power, governance, and the continent’s place in a rapidly changing world?

In this episode, CEDAR host Temitayo Odeyemi talks to Dr Adeoye Akinola about his new co-edited volume African Union and Agenda 2063: The Past, Present, and Future (UJ Press, 2025) to unpack what over two decades of continental politics teach us about Africa’s democratic future, regional integration, and global voice.

Adeoye O. Akinola is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, where he leads the African Union Studies Unit. His research spans African political economy, governance, peace and security, and regional integration. His other publications include The Resurgence of Military Coups and Democratic Relapse in Africa (Palgrave 2024) and The Political Economy of Xenophobia in Africa (Springer 2018).

Temitayo Isaac Odeyemi is a Research Fellow in Democratic Resilience at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR). His research examines institutions, actors, and democratic engagement in Africa.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Election, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the forces that promote and undermine democratic government around the world.

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As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest.

Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support.

Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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The pig played a fundamental role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create and sustain a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany produced more pork per capita than West Germany and the UK, while also suffering myriad unintended consequences of this centrally planned practice: manure pollution, animal disease, and rolling food shortages.

In Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall (University of Washington Press, 2020), historian Thomas Fleischman uncovers three types of pig that played roles in this history: the industrial pig, remade to suit the conditions of factory farming; the wild boar, whose overpopulation was a side effect of agricultural development rather than a conservation success story; and the garden pig, reflective of the regime's growing acceptance of private, small-scale farming within the planned economy.

Fleischman chronicles East Germany's journey from family farms to factory farms, explaining how communist principles shaped the adoption of industrial agriculture practices. More broadly, Fleischman argues that agriculture under communism came to reflect standard practices of capitalist agriculture, and that the pork industry provides a clear illustration of this convergence. His analysis sheds light on the causes of the country's environmental and political collapse in 1989 and offers a warning about the high cost of cheap food in the present and future.

Thomas Fleischman is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester.

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